I was very surprised to see them enter the server space, but their is a pretty targeted demographic for such a product, in a world where server hardware and rackspace are a commodity.

If they were going to enter the voice space at all, I would expect a product along the lines of the “iPhone” which has been speculated about for some time. I think they’d be looking for more of a mass market, with an immediate path to ROI.

This is why I smell oportunity for someone like Apple, who is known for adding that crucial usability angle to emerging tech. Is the market big enough, especially when you consider competition from Centrex-like services, that is the question.

One poster mentions the potential for “real world application of hardware on something like an ADSL WiFi Router.” Asterisk has already been successfully integrated with off the shelf, consumer grade router hardware from Linksys. You can’t do much heavy lifting, i.e transcoding, on such a host platform, but Moore’s Law should change that over the next few years.

I suppose one could eventually provide a solution out of the box that you simply install like a Microsoft product with new features.

The big trend to watch now is the death of centralized phone systems in general. We only use Asterisk to route calls, and use Gizmo as the end point, which is another example of Isen’s Stupid Network principle. It’s smart, getting smarter, and has a nice UI. So we let it decide what to do with call forwarding, voice mail, etc.

Neat stuff, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

http://www.oreillynet.com/etel/blog/2006/07/creatingaglobalpbxwith_ast.html